Ethereum Accused of Copying Cardano's Core Design
Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has accused Ethereum of quietly adopting its Extended Unspent Transaction Output (EUTXO) logic. According to Hoskinson, Ethereum developers are trying to copy Cardano's EUTXO model without giving it due credit.
Hoskinson made the accusation in response to a new research design proposed by Ethereum Foundation researcher Toni Wahrstätter. The proposal aims to treat simple payments as temporary, one-shot objects rather than permanent account-state entries, which would help reduce Ethereum state growth.
The approach is similar to Bitcoin's UTXO model, where each output is created once, spent once, and then leaves the active memory set. Wahrstätter estimated that this change could cut permanent state for payment workloads by about 99.8%, as a native UTXO would leave only 0.3 bytes.
Hoskinson's complaint is not entirely unfounded, given Ethereum's history of borrowing ideas from other projects without proper acknowledgment. The Ethereum design has not yet become a formal EIP, and any protocol change would still need community review and a hard fork.